The five or so regular readers here are probably wondering where I’ve gone. After all, I’m working from home, so I should have lots of time to write, right?
The sad truth is that I feel like I have less time to write than before. Between three current projects that actually pay money, our kitchen installation (countertops are going in as I peck away) and life in general, I think the folks here at the Lockardugan Estates have less free time than they did two months ago.
There have been several folks who have made our lives easier this past month, as we hunt for food out of the boxes in our dining room and wash dishes in the bathroom. The Cauzzis generously offered their kitchen during our demolition phase downstairs, and we’ve taken them up on many delicious warm dinners. They are also raising three tiny babies, so we’ve tried to be respectful of their time and help out if we can. When Todd asked me if I could take a look at their front windows before the cold weather swept into Baltimore, I took him up on it without thinking twice.
Indulge me for a minute as I bring up a little Dugan History here. During my junior year of college, I got a side job painting the house of one of my professors, which made eating and drinking (primarily drinking) more economically feasible. I spent the fall of 1992 on her porch, scraping and painting the ceiling, listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana from the nearby Loyola dorms and working until the dusk made it too dark to see. As word got out in the neighborhood about the student handyman, I got another job after that working on her friend M’s house, shifting to interior work for the winter and back outside in the spring. She liked having me there, and we settled into a comfortable routine during the season—I’d come out and work for four hours, and she’d cook us both dinner. We became friends outside of the work I was doing on her house, and she went so far as to host a graduation party in her backyard for me.
After leaving college with a less-than-practical degree in Illustration, I kept housepainting, switching back and forth between houses, getting more and more involved as time went on. Simple painting gave way to repair carpentry, removing shingle siding, basic roofing, restoring sash windows, running air conditioning ductwork, insulating, and eventually gutting/rehabbing a bathroom in a third neighbor’s house. I worked in that neighborhood for the better part of two years, and while I thought I did a pretty decent job, I was a lousy businessman. After two years I had to give it up to seek a better-paying job doing design.
Working at the Cauzzis’ yesterday reminded me of that first fall I spent outdoors, working hard to keep warm and race the sun. I pulled the storms out, scraped and glazed the windows, and got a coat of primer to dry with an hour of sunlight to spare. H. made me lunch, which I finally ate at about 3, and I headed back out to put a coat of paint on the windowframes. As I was on the ladder, I was thinking about all the people in my life who have helped me along the way, and about the simple pleasure of helping my friends. I don’t think I’ve done a very good job of tipping the scale back, but I’d like to think I made a good start yesterday. So, thanks to W. and M. for keeping me employed (and fed) back in the day, and thanks to the Cauzzis for letting me pay it forward.
This is an animation of my grandparents’ house between a photo taken in the mid 50’s and another taken in the early 90’s. I put it together about 5 or 6 years ago and forgot all about it until recently.
This is the best commentary I’ve heard so far from anybody, and I think it should be reprinted everywhere. (via)
Wow. Right on.
“The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.” Tell that to the thousands of people who live below the poverty line and can’t afford to leave, asshole. Isn’t it your job to, um, figure out where they should go?
Update: This is disturbing…
So we’ve begun the complicated dance they call ‘professional home renovation’. It’s a complicated number; it involves being clean and dressed by a certain time, and the steps are more tightly choreographed. I’ve always compared it to swing-dancing in a minefield, based on my previous experience.
Up until the reality of hanging thousand-dollar cabinets in an out of square room hit me, I was happy to do just about everything myself. For the more specialized and dangerous tasks, like hooking high-voltage circuit breakers up to the board, or sanding oak floors, I was happy to hire somebody in. But this kitchen is a whole project; there’s demolition, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, framing, and finish work to be done in a particular order, and it’s all pretty specialized. If I had a million dollars and a month off work, I’d actually be looking forward to doing things like moving the gas line, or hanging the cabinets myself. But this house is out of square in four dimensions—which means I’d wake up two weeks after I started with nothing done, holding a pile of sawdust and some nails, and have no recollection of where I’d been or how the basement got flooded.
We’re thrilled with the kitchen planning company we went with (more info on that later: Movable Type now has unlimited weblogs, which means the house will get its own specific page) and we already have a plumber we know and like. We had an electrician, too, but I kept losing his number. I’ll back up:
Two years ago, we moved into this wreck of a house with a few conditions on the settlement. One of them was for the sellers to merge both electrical services into one (the doctor’s office was separate from the house) and upgrade the panel, which dated back to the 60’s and was a brand known for its ability to spontaneously catch fire. BG&E Home sent out a crew the first week we were in the house, which was a minor miracle based on further experience—I’m not recommending them—which consisted of one very nice man named B. who came to sort out the rat’s nest of wiring in our basement. I was at work, and Jen was upstairs in the kitchen unpacking our collection of orphan dishes, when she realized somebody was standing in the back doorway: The doctor’s son, who smelled like he’d fallen into a bottle (this was before noon on a weekday.) Jen’s curiosity got her talking to this man, and she felt safe enough to walk outside with him, knowing that B. was downstairs and by the window. (I’ll let her tell the rest of that story.)
Later on, after seeing the work he’d done, we got to talking with B. and asked him if he did electrical work on the side, pointing at all the ancient, deadly outlets around the house. He gave us his cell number, and I promptly lost it in the shuffle of housework and an upgrade to OS X. We tracked him down through BG&E, who gave us the number of his current employer, and I did a little social engineering with their receptionist to get his cell number. He came back out to hook up the wiring I’d prepared in the bedrooms, and a fair price for four hours’ work turned into a fair price for eight hours’ work (through no fault of his). He also got to meet Jen’s Mom, who had that particular ability of the terminally ill to ask probing questions into his personal life. He took all this in stride, which meant he was Good People. At this point he’d left BG&E Home and was working for another company, but was doing work for us on the side so we weren’t paying the markup. Unfortunately, I lost his number again during one of the many moves up and down the stairs before the wedding, and my focus was directed elsewhere after we returned from the honeymoon.
I should also add that my previous encounters with electricians have all been expensive and unsatisfying: For example, the job done in my first house was three times as expensive for half the work (and I’d done most of the prep, thinking it would save money.) This did not make me happy, and I decided never to re-hire that particular white trash electrician and his toothless apprentice.
Now that we’ve got the gears whirring, I realized we had to track B. down again through the various things we knew about him. Jen did a search online and found his old address down the street. (Aren’t the internets wonderful? Isn’t that also a little frightening, too?) There was no phone number associated with the address, and 411 couldn’t tell me anything. We decided to do a little footwork, and stopped at the address last weekend. I rang the doorbell, and we waited outside for a few minutes, but nothing happened. As we were walking back down the sidewalk, the door opened, and a woman in the throes of a massive sinus infection asked if she could help us. It turned out that this was B.’s wife, and that she didn’t have his number (they’re separated) but she’d pass along our information. We gave it to her, apologizing for getting her out of bed, and put the whole thing in the hands of the Sky Pilot.
As I was driving home yesterday evening, I called Jen to talk about dinner plans, and she told me she was talking with B., who was standing in our living room! He’d heard part of the story from his wife, knew of only one family on that side of Frederick road he’d done work for, and stopped by to see if it was us. As Jen explained all the work we had, his eyes got bigger and bigger. We stood and caught up for about a half hour, and he seemed happy to know we were looking for him. The sense of relief we have for getting him on the job is immense—he’s reliable, he’s good, and we like him. We’ve got first dibs, but if you need a good electrician in the Baltimore area, let me know. Because we have his number.
Two years ago, only a few scant weeks after Jen and I moved into an old, creaky house surrounded by old, creaky trees, hurricane Isabel flew through our neighborhood and knocked out the power. The two of us hunkered down on our mattress in the living room (this was before we’d accomplished anything upstairs) and and waited out the storm by candlelight, hoping we wouldn’t wake up in bed with the neighbor’s car. It turned out alright, though a family down the street had their house crushed by a tree (and almost wound up getting crushed themselves.)
I suppose, since there were dire predicitions of disaster earlier this year, that I got a little callous with Katrina. I also figure because I wasn’t watching as much TV this past week, I wasn’t getting the breathless “Storm Warning Updates” by the chuckleheads on our local newscasts. I was dimly aware of the hurricane and its aftermath, but it was only last night, sitting in front of CNN and watching footage of the disaster, that I really understood how fucked up the Gulf Coast actually is. Jen and I talked about making a donation to the Red Cross (which is apparently the best thing to do right now-they can’t handle canned goods or delivering supplies just yet) and we’ll get some money out to them in the next day or so.
My heart goes out to the folks in Louisiana and Georgia. God bless, and good luck.
Remember when I was talking about shark attacks a week or two ago?
There’s all this crap on the news about shark attacks this week. Does anybody remember four years ago, when there were all kinds of hysterical reports about shark attacks? Something else happened, and we forgot all about it.
I don’t think I’ve talked too much here or elsewhere about my Dad’s reposession agency. Back in 1984, my Dad decided to leave the rat race and purchase his own business. After a bunch of research, he found the most unlikely of ventures in the most unlikely of places: an established reposession agency based in a sleepy town north of New York City. I’ll have to go into some of the stories of culture shock at a different time, but this was a huge leap of faith for the whole family. We moved into a prewar house on the side of a mountain, surrounded by forest, and facing a fenced impound lot. When I say fenced, I mean chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and floodlights. The house was decent, if you count the inground pool, jacuzzi, and huge living room; it sucked for me because I lived in a tiny unheated room in the middle of nowhere with no car.
Having no car wasn’t an issue until I turned sixteen, because I wasn’t driving anyplace anyway. The bus sucked ass, but I knew my parents were too busy to be carting me all over creation. Besides, I got to drive cars all the time. I had a built-in job helping the yardman start, move, release, and fix the cars in the lot. How many people do you know who were driving Porsches at fifteen? I could parallel park a standard-shift car two years before the driving test. (I got pretty good at picking car locks, too, but that’s another story.) Besides working for my Dad, blowing shit up and exploring the local woods were pretty much all I did in the 9th grade.
By the 10th grade, though, life was getting pretty hellish. The local asshats were making bus rides a nightmare (it’s difficult to stand up to four guys who each outweigh you by 100lbs) and I was getting involved in school activities which meant I was staying after a lot.
Now, my best friend S. was taking a driving course at the Boces which meant he didn’t need a learning permit after taking the test like all the rest of us pukes. He also came from a large family which demanded a part-time chauffeur, something that was difficult for his parents, who worked all the time. They decided that he could help out and be the chauffeur, so they bought him a car. Not just any car, but a used 1970-something Cadillac Coupe De Ville. It was the ugliest car on the road, which is probably why it was affordable. It was also huge. Each door weighed about 500 pounds. The rear bench seat was half a mile wide, upholstered in a lovely shade of blue vinyl. (The car had once been baby blue, but someone had painted it rattle-can gray in the early eighties, and the paint cracked, so it looked like cat puke on a blue rug.)
Now, bear with me here. We spent a lot of summer days at the Dugan house, because of the pool. We also had a fully-stocked garage with lots of outlandish and exotic tools. One day S. came by with the Caddy and asked if I could help him replace the original AM radio with a new cassette deck. No problem, I said. This shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, and then we can swim for a while. We grabbed some pliers and screwdrivers, turned on the radio in the garage, and got to work taking apart the dashboard of his car.
Three hours later, cursing, sweating, and covered in twenty-year-old dust, we still hadn’t budged the thing. We had disassembled half the dashboard, laid it all out in neat sections on the driveway, and still couldn’t figure out how the engineers in Detroit had designed this car. It sounds like we were both idiots as far as mechanical engineers are concerned, but don’t let this story fool you: I had been taking apart and fixing things like radios, engines, and tools for years. S. also had natural skill in taking stuff apart—we weren’t just a pair of monkeys banging on suitcases out there.
For awhile it looked like we were going to have to remove the windshield to get at the back of the radio (I’m not kidding here. There was a flap of metal that curved up and over the back of the glass and down below the back of the thing) but we realized that there was another way. After taking apart most of the AC ducting under the dash, we had enough room to get at it, or at least, see the bottom of it, and we realized we had a problem: the damn thing was huge. I mean, the size of a toaster oven huge. The hole we had was about half the size, and there was no real evident way how to get it out of there.
At this point, S. had had enough of this shit, and just wanted to get the damn thing out of the car. We switched from finesse to brute strength, trading screwdrivers for chisels and hammers. Fifteen minutes later, we had a big enough hole carved out of non load-bearing metal to yank the bottom of the radio down toward the floorboards. When it finally came out, in a cloud of dust and old cigarette butts, we breathed a sigh of relief. It was then that we realized just what a bastard this thing was: it weighed about fifteen pounds, and it looked like a piece of discarded Soviet military equipment. But the corker was that it had one thick wire hanging off the back, which lead to a complicated, ancient plastic harness with no diagram. This meant bad news. This meant there would be no new radio in the Cadillac.
This radio had to die.
But how to do it? How to properly dispose of this foul, ancient, cursed beast?
It turned out that the answer was right over our heads.
At some point, when my mother’s back was obviously turned, S. and I found that we could easily climb onto the roof of the garage. From there, it was a simple matter of time before we started jumping from the roof of the garage, over four feet of solid concrete, and into the deep end of the pool. (The garage was separated from the house by the pool, and was built to withstand hurricanes. It had a two-story peak and a slope gentle enough to scale.) In a good clip, it was a one-minute circuit around the back of the garage, onto the roof, and into the water. We decided we would use this ninja skill for purposes of evil. S. backed the Cadillac up twenty feet (after filling the trunk with the assorted debris from the dashboard-half of it would remain there until the car was officially retired) and we climbed onto the roof of the garage and met at the peak. S. said a few words, which have now been lost to the ages, and lofted the radio up into the afternoon sunshine.
It came down onto the pavement with a dull thud, bounced, and came to a stop. There was no evident damage. I climbed down to retrieve it, handed it back up to him, and he threw it again. This cycle repeated at least five or six times, until one of the corners began to give way. Then, it seemed like the thing just flew apart. In a cloud of electrical components, metal, and plastic, the radio exploded, and we cheered heartily at the death of the beast.
Before retiring to the pool, we examined the lump of metal that had once been a radio. Tubes and wires stuck out the side, and little sheets of metal fell from the back plate. We realized we were standing in a circle of these things, and I bent to pick one up. It was flat, and shaped like an uppercase “E”. There were hundreds of them on the ground. It took us another half an hour to police all of the damn things up.
S. finally did put his stereo in that Caddy, hanging out of the cavernous hole left by the Beast, and it stayed with the car until its retirement. We never did figure out what the ‘E’s were for, but when I take the Jeep radio, which has begun to fail on me more and more, and throw it off the roof of our house onto the pavement, I’m going to be looking for those goddamn ‘E’s.
Somebody busted out the Nerf darts at work today. For anybody who was employed by a certain alma mater of mine (or any dot-com, for that matter), this is a recognizable portent of doom.
<huddles under desk, shivering>
Update: It’s worse than I thought. Todd brought me one of the darts, which has the company name printed on the side for GDC. The timetable for Judgement has been moved forward six months.
The End Of An Era. Growing up on the outskirts of the New York City area, the local TV stations played many commercials aimed at that market. Besides the Broadway musical, Ritz Thrift Shop, and Potampkin Cadillac ads, there was the ever-present jingle for Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, accompanied by shots of goy vacationers skiing down shallow slopes, doing the overbite shuffle to Engelbert Humperdinck, and lounging in heart-shaped jacuzzis. This, apparently, was the height of luxury. It was to my dismay this morning to read that the whole place is up for auction, including those heart-shaped tubs. (If those tubs could only talk….yeccch.)
Upgrade. Yesterday I took advantage of the lull at work (about half the staff stayed home to take care of their kids) to install Movable Type on my Powerbook. Following a combination of these directions and the included instructions, I had the whole thing running in about ten minutes, with some minor glitches. I’d used the previous 2.X series a couple years ago, and found it easy to use, but the lure of inexpensive bandwidth has kept me decidedly low-tech. Looking around at some options, however, I think I’ve decided to invest in a secondary web address and migrate this log off the domain to a seperate location. This will allow for (finally!) the ease of online content addition, as opposed to hand-coding every log entry; a solution to requests for an RSS feed, a local comments database, a sideblog or two, and other goodies. I’m currently wrestling the CSS included with Movable Type and redesigning the layout, and when I have a clean working layout, I’ll pull the trigger and set up a new site. Suggestions for a new domain name, anyone?